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Speaking on The WIRED.co.uk Podcast with WIRED editor David Rowan, before the announcement at Mobile World Congress, Durov said the messaging service had doubled in size in 12 months. "We've just announced that we've reached 100 million active users. They're spread across the globe," he said. "You can't name one specific market that would account for 25 or 30 percent. We're growing on every continent."

In the full one hour podcast, Durov explains how the company has established itself as a competitor in the heavily crowded messaging scene, how he offered Edward Snowden a job, and how the app is exploring ways to stop terrorist organisations such as the Islamic State from using its channel.

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Telegram, founded in 2013, uses a secure end-to-endencryption method that makes messages virtually impossible to decode. That core concept, combined with an ad-free business model, has allowed it to take a significant share of the market away from Facebook and other messaging rivals.

Simplicity is key, he says. "We deliver 15 billion messages per day. The core engineering team is 15 people and we have obviously had to automate a lot of things and rely on scripts and artificial intelligence rather than human labour to keep everything up and running."

The company doesn't make any money, has a tiny number of staff and has no permanent base. The company, and its main team, relocate in Europe every "two to fourth months" Durov says in the podcast.

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Telegram has has come under fire for creating a space where extremists could evade surveillance, and in November Telegram staff removed 78 publicly accessible channels, which were sharing Islamic State propaganda. Durov says there is more the company can do; the company is blocking "a few" public Islamic State channels that are being used for propaganda, for instance. "We're trying to build tools that would enable us to do it in a more efficient way," he says. This includes an "automated" tool to help the staff identify the content. "Are we doing enough? Probably not because we're a small team and we are trying to scale. We hire more and more people processing these reports and requests. We're gradually building tools to automate this process -- but it all takes time, obviously. We try to make it one of our priorities."

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